Selecting the Best Test Data Management Strategy for Your Test Automation Process

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Selecting the Best Test Data Management Strategy
for Your Test Automation Process
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• Test data is exceptionally critical for setting a
  great data management strategy, especially when
  it comes to making the most of your test
  automation process.
• However, there are quite a number of software
  professionals who are unfamiliar with the concept
  of test data management. Even if they are
  familiar with the concept, it is quite a task for
  them to put it into practice.
• The reason being, the what in it is quite easy
  to decipher, but when it comes to the how,
  there are quite a few methods to manage test
  data. Lets look at a few of them.
• Replicating Data from Production
• This is one of the most popular methods, at least
  if you are a beginner. The very first thing that
  you encounter while coming up with the data is to
  feed your testing processes, many believe it is a
  straightforward process of just copying data from
  production and get over with it.
• It is one of the effortless ways to get data that
  is as realistic as possible. Nothing can get more
  real than this. However, nothing is as easy as it
  sounds while production data replication.

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• On the contrary, the only benefit is the easy
  access to data. And as far as the loopholes are
  concerned, there are many, including
• The primary problem is that it needs to be
  conducted manually. Although you can always rely
  on scripts and automated jobs to do the work,
  creating the data is not the only job of an IT
  test environment management. Availability is a
  crucial part of the package.
• In simple terms, it means that the TDM tool is
  responsible for ensuring that the data is
  available, whenever required, at an appropriate
  time.

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• You can not rely on a naive approach based on
  scripts to manage the rigorous demands of a
  sophisticated testing approach, making you force
  to rely on a manual process to do the task.
• The second problem is that the production
  replication does not lend itself well when it
  comes to negative test cases. Production
  replication data also does not work here, in case
  you do not have any data to replicate.
• Data Masking

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• As the name suggests, under this approach, the
  user applies the mask to production data that get
  rid of personally identifiable information (PII)
  from the data.
• This method is an improvement over the strategy
  we discussed earlier. However, it is not short of
  loopholes. The very first being, it does not
  reduce the time spent while copying data for
  testing.
• On the contrary, it adds more time to the process
  since it is a newly added process. However, the
  most significant limitation is that you cannot
  use it as a standalone approach. The problem is,
  it can resolve all of the issues that the
  production replication approach has.
• Synthetic Data Generation
• This method of data test management consists of
  creating fake or synthetic data from the data
  model. Tools that execute this approach can
  preserve the format of the data. The biggest
  benefit of this approach is also its significant
  downside.

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• We wish that you select the best test data
  management strategy for your test automation
  project. So, which of these test data management
  strategies do you wish to adopt for your test
  automation process?

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Contact Us

• Company Name Enov8
• Contact Person Ashley Hosking
• Address Level 5, 14 Martin Place, Sydney, 2000,
  New South Wales, Australia
• Phone [phone]
• E-mail enov8australia_at_gmail.com
• Website https//www.enov8.com

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Thank You